EMPTY 
CHURCHES 


By 


Cuar.es JostaH GALPIN 


THE CENTURY CoO. 
New York and London 





hes att : 
MAW iA 


awe 
. 


AGRICULTURAL | 








EMPTY CHURCHES 





By the Same Author 


Rurat Lire 


Rurat Soctat ProBLEMSs 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


THE RURAL-URBAN DILEMMA 


/ 


Ge 


CHARLES JOSIAH GALPIN 


IN CHARGE OF THE DIVISION OF FARM POPULATION AND RURAL LIFE, 
BUREAU OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, 
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, 





THE CENTURY CO. 
New York & London 










JAN 16 1989 


awe 
“Hear ogicat. SEM 


Coprricut, 1925, ny 
THE CENTURY Co. 


PRINTED IN U. &, A. 


In Memoru of 
My Fatuer anp MoTHEr 
Who Spent Their Lives 
In Loving Ministration in 


Country Parishes 








Pa te oa 
Cie iV pees 








PREFACE 


Tus little book invites you to read it 
at a single sitting. If read later, a sec- — 
tion at a time, in the light of the whole 
story, it will give you a better account 
of itself. Itis, I frankly acknowledge, 
written out of emotion. It does not 
therefore, I fear, contain all the words 
it implies—half the time falling into 
symbols and incidents to force a mean- 
ing; half the time taking for granted 
that you do not care to open or close 
every side gate along the way. 

The view of a layman, as this easily 
betrays itself to be, may prove some- 
thing of a shock to the rank and file of 
the clergy; but it will serve, at least, to 


[ vii } 


PREFACE 


show that a section of laymen take reli- 
gion more seriously after all than they 
do economics, which forms their daily 
adventure. Deep in our hearts, many 
of us know that business is the great 
masculine sport of the age; and in com- 
parison, the role of the priest and pas- 
tor and the function of the church lie in 
the far different realm of the heroic. 
If I seem in this essay to expect too 
much of the church and too much 
of the preacher, my only apology 
is my inability to read into the Four 
Gospels, that stand on my desk along 
with the other tools of life and work, a 
philosophy of ease or of complacent 
laissez faire. 

Although a confirmed lover of the 
country, the farm, the farmer and his 
children, I am none the less a firm be- 
liever in the city—its necessity, func- 


[viii] 


PREFACE 


tion, and destiny. Rural social wel- 
fare, as I see it, is of utmost concern to 
the American city. This is why empty 
churches along the countryside bring 
tragedy to city and country alike. This 
is why ecclesiastical statesmen should go 
to the country and see with their own 
eyes the havoc wrought upon the farm- 
ers family by competitive religion 
among Protestants. 

And this is all the little book sets out 
to do—to take everybody to the rural 
communities with wide-open eyes, to see 
the empty churches, the children with- 
out God, the farm tenants without reli- 
gion, the parsons on the run for the city, 
and the beginnings of a new type of 
rural church. 

I wish gratefully to acknowledge my 
indebtedness in this essay to the staff of 
the Institute of Social and Religious 

[ix] 


PREFACE 


Research, New York City, upon whose 
authoritative statements I have much 
relied. To the Curtis Publishing Com- 
pany, Philadelphia, I desire to express 
appreciation for their kindness in allow- 
ing me to reproduce here materials 
which have appeared in “The Country 
Gentleman” during the past year. 


C. J. GALPIN. 
March, 1925. 


[x] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


vaht 

mdi , 7 
os Sea A 
aH (oO ee 


*. 


ct 
we» 
oF 





EMPTY CHURCHES 


CHAPTER I 


ECENTLY, in a cross-roads 
country church, a minister of the 
Gospel, underpaid, somewhat shabby, 
but eager and inspired, a man with a 
message to give, stood before his congre- 
gation to present that message. The 
flame of inspiration in his haggard 
young face flickered and died as he 
looked down at the scanty congrega- 
tion assembled before him to hear the 
Word of God. Ata glance he counted 
his handful of hearers. Six. 
Through a window on one side of 


[3] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the little church, he could see two other 
meeting-houses nestling in the curve of 
the road. Through a window on the 
other side, he looked out at a third— 
four country churches of four Christian 
denominations, almost identical in doc- 
trine, there within two stone’s-throws 
of one another. 

In three of these churches, including 
his own, he knew that the members of 
the congregation might be counted 
upon the fingers of each pastor’s two 
hands. ‘The third church was closed 
that day; its flock could afford only an 
occasional shepherd. 

In all four of those churches put to- 
gether, not one fair-sized congregation. 
In all four, not one pastor paid a salary 
large enough to enable him to live on his 
income as a minister. In all four, men 
and women taxed by religion beyond 


[4] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





their ability to pay, yet unable to sup- 
port their church without outside aid. 


Jealous Denominations 


THE young minister thought with pain 
of other sections of the country 
through which he had traveled all day 
without seeing one church of any de- 
nomination. He knew that an appall- 
ing percentage of farm communities 
throughout the United States were en- 
tirely without churches, that thousands 
of children, hundreds of their elders, had 
never listened to the preaching of the 
Gospel. Yet here there were four 
churches at the country cross-roads! 

That afternoon that young pastor 
wrote me a letter, wrote it in pain and 
bitterness, but also in hope, in ear- 
nest desire to get the facts before the 
nation: 


[5] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


I saw in the paper the other day some 
mention of the chief rural problems of the 
United States. May I call your attention 
to what ministers in every country district 
regard as the stiffest problem known to them 
and to their people? I refer to the problem 
of the competitive religion, which affects not 
only pastors, but the entire rural popula- 
tion, financially and spiritually, as well. 
The spiritual rivalry set in motion by well- 
meaning home-mission boards and zealous 
and jealous denominations is undermining 
the present and the future welfare of the 
country church by ignoring the law of 
supply and demand. If you can suggest 
any solution for this great problem, we shall 
all be grateful. 


The case was in no way overstated 
by this young man. It is quite true 
that there are few, if any, greater rural 
problems to-day than the problem of 
the country church. It is undeniable 


[6] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


that any honest student of conditions 
in rural churches is confronted by stag- 
gering and depressing statistics of 
overchurching and _ underattendance 
in some sections, and of entire lack of 
attendance due to no churching at all 
in others. 

Any map that showed the pres- 
ent rural church distribution of the 
United States would be alarmingly 
reminiscent of a map of a country with 
large areas of sterile famine-land. 
Nine persons out of every hundred in | 
rural America can not get to church be- 
cause there is no church for them to 
attend. This means that one seventh 
of all the rural communities of the. 
United States are entirely without ' 
Protestant churches. Pathetic reports 
of the spiritual hunger of these land- 
dwellers, living in a Christian nation 


[7] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


yet entirely shut off from Christian 
organization of every kind, come from 
these communities. 

“No Protestant sermon has ever 
been preached in this locality,” is one 
S OS sent out from a neighborhood 
of two hundred persons. “Not a child 
in this district has ever attended 
Sunday-school,” deprecates another 
community of approximately the same 
size. “This back-to-the-land move- 
ment is fine, but why should loyal 
land dwellers have to condemn their 
children to heathenry?” demands a° 
distracted mother, in a remote section of 
a Western State. “My children are 
growing up to be little savages, as far 
as religion is concerned. They have 
never been inside a church in their lives, 
and they don’t know what Sunday- 
school means.” 


[8] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Only one fifth of the rural popu- 
lation goes to church. 

Two fifths of the rural churches of 
the country are standing still or los- 
ing ground. 

A quarter of all rural churches | 
have no Sunday-school. 

One fifth of all rural churches are 
kept alive by home-mission aid. Of 
these subsidized churches, a large 
number are in active competition 
with churches of very similar doc- 
trines. 

Seven out of every ten rural 
churches have only a fraction of a 
pastor apiece. 

One third of all rural pastors re- 
ceive so low a salary that they can 
live only by working at some other 
occupation. 

One half of the rural churches of 
the country make an annual gain in 
membership of as much as 10 per 
cent. 





EMPTY CHURCHES 


In striking contrast to this church- 
less seventh of the country, are the 
other six sevenths of rural America, 
many of them so overchurched that 
they are crying out for relief from the 
burdens the churches are laying upon 
them. There are ten times as many 
churches for every thousand persons in 
some of the rural districts of the 
United States as there are in New 
York City. Yet the percentage of 
attendance for every thousand persons 
is slightly lower in these rural sections 
than it is even in New York. Obvi- 
ously, such a showing indicates a 
startling lack of system in the distribu- 
tion of rural churches, a woeful waste 
of the religious potentialities of the 
country. 

Recently, a thorough survey of the 

[10] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


rural church problem of the United 
States was made for the first time in 
the history of the country, under the 
direction of H. N. Morse and Edmund 
de S. Brunner, of the Institute of 
Social and Religious Research, of New 
York. Some of the statistics obtained 
by them are presented in the foregoing © 
paragraphs. 

These facts, of course, offer a severe 
shock to those who have the little white 
church of the countryside enshrined in 
memory along with the little red school- 
house. We have fallen into the rut of 
taking it for granted that our country 
churches not only keep pace with the 
best religious life of the nation, but even 
stay a step or two in advance, if not 
in theology, at least in interest in godly 
things and in piety. We have come to 


[11] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


think of country folk as the true 
church-goers of the United States. To 
this sentimental point of view the facts 
stated offer a true affront. 


Fewer Church-goers 


THERE are to-day approximately 
101,000 rural churches in the United 
States. A long time ago, when there 
were only a hundred such churches, 
virtually the entire country population 
attended them. Some time later, when 
there were a thousand churches of the 
kind, the average of attendance was 
still exceedingly high. But of recent 
years the percentage of rural church- 
goers has almost seemed to be in an 
inverse ratio to the increase in churches. 
One out of every five is not a showing 
that would have brought joy to the 
Puritan Fathers. What is the reason 
[12] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


for, this precarious situation in the 
rural churches of our nation? Does it 
indicate that our country population 
is made up of a less God-fearing folk 
than in former years? Does it demon- 
strate that religion is less near to the 
hearts of the farm workers of the 
United States than is true of its city | 
dwellers? Or are these conditions the 
logical outgrowth of a faulty system, 
the inevitable result of a church distri- 
bution spiritually and economically 
unsound ? 

More than one thing must be taken 
into consideration in any fair-minded 
attempt to answer these questions. 
For instance, there is the fact that dur- 
ing the past few years the number of | 
tenant-farmers in the United States 
has steadily increased, until now 
thirty eight per cent. of the farms are 

[13] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


tenant operated, most often on the basis 
of the one-year lease. Any fact that 
tends to make the farmer, more or less 
a transient in the community natur- 
ally deters him from forming’ social 
or religious relationships. 

Another reason frequently given for 
the low average of rural church attend- 
ance is that so high a percentage— 
nearly 30 per cent.—of the nation’s 
land workers are new Americans, the 
foreign-born, or the children of the 
foreign-born. There are States, such 
as North Dakota, where nearly every 
other farmer belongs to other than 
American nativity, and whole sections 
of the country, as in the Middle West, 
where foreigners are in excess of two 
fifths of the population. It is esti- 
mated that at the present time more 


[14] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


than fifty per cent. of these people 
are unministered to by any church, 
Catholic or Protestant. Where any- 
thing like an earnest and comprehen- 
sive attempt has been made by churches 
to be of aid to them, as among the 
Mexicans of California, it has been 
marked by astonishing results. Then > 
why have the churches done practically 
nothing for the foreign-born in rural 
_ sections? If the new American can 
make good on the land, is it too much 
_ to ask the church to make good with the 
new American? 

When I hear it said that no one is 
really interested in religion any more, 
I cannot help thinking of an elderly 
Yankee farmer in the State of Ver- 
mont, one J. C. Coolidge, father of 
our President, a man who talks little 


[15] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


about religion, but who for years has 
given virtually all his leisure time, and 
a considerable slice of time not leisure at 
all, to keeping alive the little white 
church near his farm: at Plymouth 
Notch. He hauls the wood from his 
own land that the congregation of that 
little church may listen in comfort to 
the Word of God; he even, I am told, 
does the janitor work himself, since 
the church has no funds for a janitor. 
There is nothing especially remarkable 
in this. ‘There are thousands of such 
men all over our country, men to whom 
the church is a thing to make sacri- 
fices for, to keep alive at whatever 
cost, 

But in many districts it really seems 
that the fewer churches a county is 
able to afford, the more it is apt to 
have. Out of the 211 churches finan- 

[16] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


cially aided by home-missions societies 
in several counties where intensive 
studies were made by the Institute of 
Social and Religious Research, I am 
told that it was found that 149 of these 
churches could have been dispensed — 
with without essential loss to any- 
one. All but thirty-four were com-— 
petitive. 


_ Untrained Country Preachers 


ANOTHER grave charge is made against 
the church to-day in our country dis- 
tricts. Farmers feel that they are 
neglected by the ministers of their 
churches. 

It is also charged that many rural 
pastors lack both adequate training 
and ability for their high calling. The 
real marvel is that so many of these 
men are of the high type they are. 

[17] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


It has to be admitted that there is 
ground for the charge of incompetency 
among some of the rural pastors of 
the United States. These men, it is 
true, are most inadequately prepared 
for their work. How are they to af- 
ford more training for a calling which 
will never pay them any returns upon 
it? That these men can develop into 
able preachers has been demonstrated 
by those who have had the opportunity 
to complete their courses in the sum- 
mer school for ministers, inaugurated, 
I believe, by the Presbyterian Board 
and now conducted by several denom- 
inations. But most of them do not 
have this chance. 

It is competitive religion that is 
largely responsible for these two dan- 
gerous factors in rural religious life— 


[18] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the non-resident pastor, too occupied 
to be a true spiritual shepherd; and the 
incompetent pastor, too incapable to 
be a leader of his people. 

But Christianity will not vanish 
from our country districts. Nowhere | 
is there better soil for the seeds of true 
religion than in the sturdy soul of — 
rural America. 

It is not so much isms or ologies 
that the rural population wants as it 
is religious facilities for themselves and 
for their children. Some time ago, 
when a study of fifteen Western States 
was made by the Home Mission 
Council, it mentioned the following 
fact: 

“The general feeling manifested by 
the returns shows little care for denom- 
inationalism. What these people want 


[19] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


is some one to present Bible facts in an 
acceptable manner.” 


The Call Can Be Met 


THIs is as true to-day as it was when 
it was written ten years ago. Sunday- 
schools for their children; an adequate 
number of churches, not fewer than 
will meet their needs or more than they 
can support; usable churches, open the 
year round, with able ministers in 
charge—these are the things the pop- 
ulation of our rural districts wants. 
How are they to.get them? By the 
installation of system into the religious 
life of the country sections. There 
are enough churches in the United 
States to-day, if they were distributed 
on the basis of a real need rather than 
on the grounds of competitive religion, 
to reach the remotest sections of our 


[20] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 








country. The money now expended 
on nonproductive churches would pur- 
chase real vitality for essential churches 
all through rural America. 


[21] 


CHAPTER II 


“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a 
prey, 
When wealth accwmulates, and men 
decay.” 
GOLDSMITH. 


| P deste men and women long 
for children as they long for good 
luck, long life, and sweet happiness. 
But they do not want just children, 
any kind whatever so that they be 
children. No indeed! It is always 
a whole, healthy child, a bright, intelli- 
gent child, a loving, obedient child, a 
beautiful, virtuous child, that lives 
warm in their dreams. And a child 
with such characteristics costs more 


[22] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


than many men and women can pay; 
for a well-bred child, like a well-bred 
colt, is the product of many favoring 
tides of good fortune. 


Farms, The Place of Children 


So iT is that the Johns and Marys who 
leave the farm and its open spaces for 
city life give up having children of 
their own,—often without knowing 
it when they leave the country, to 
be sure,—and find themselves later 
doomed to work out human content- 
ment in some other way; for the high 
cost of city space, of just sufficient 
elbow-room for a child to grow in and 
acquire the human characteristics de- 
sired, is almost as prohibitive as if a 
law were on the statute-books for- 
bidding the rearing of children in city 
blocks. While my critic is biting his 
[23] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


thumb at this “exaggeration,” gravely 
asserting that he knows there are many 
families of children in our American 
cities, I have caught his eye and will 
hold it long enough to tell him a thing 
disclosed by the last United States 
Census report, viz., among the thirty 
millions of farm people, there are 
4,000,000 more children under twenty- 
one years of age than there are among 
any thirty millions of city people. 
And this bald fact virtually declares 
the truth I am uttering—that the 
country contains the children of the 
nation, that the farm is the natural 
rearing-ground of well-bred children, 
and that the city core—the stamping- 
ground of business and adults—abhors 
children as “nature abhors a vacuum.” 

My story will not reach home, how- 
ever, unless one pauses a moment to let 


[24] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


this census fact soak in. Here is an 
excess of children living on our farms 
that would make a small nation,—big- 
ger than Switzerland, bigger than 
Chili, than Norway, than famous little 
agricultural Denmark. 


Cities Get Youth from Farms 


AND what will become of this excess 
of children? What else than this? 
The farms will manage to feed them, 
clothe them, educate them until they 
come of age, when, possessed of the 
strong right arm, they will turn their 
backs on the farm and farming, and 
go to recruit the nerve-fagged industry 
of cities. 

The farms feed industry, profes- 
sional service, and city life with muscle, 
intellect, and imagination. This is 
the romance, and there is not a word in 


[25] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


it of wheat, corn, cotton, or cattle. 
This every-day function of the farm, 
often spoken of lightly, almost as if 
it were a poetic fiction, is the solid stra- 
tum of fact upon which the plot of my 
story rests. The annual _ editorial 
blast, “Keep the boy on the farm,” 
never concerns this slowly moving 
stream of young adults cityward, for 
these are a surplus, an excess. And 
they must go, as sure as fate. A legion 
of editorials could not dam back this 
flow. 

We are not without some definite 
information, moreover, as to how this 
surplus of farm population works its 
way to the cities of the nation; for a 
unique study has been made by the 
United States Department of Agri- 
culture—of the movement of 3000 
young people from a thousand farms 


[26] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





in one community—over a period of one 
hundred years—a community where 
(and this fits into my story) the God of 
the Puritans has been known by the 
children from the days of the first log 
cabins. We know just which farms 
sent their surplus crop of young folk 
away. We know exactly where they 
went in the United States. And, 
furthermore, we know what vocations 
they recruited, and what achievements 
in these vocations they made. In a 
nutshell, we know in some measure 
what the contribution of human force 
and influence was from these thousand 
farms, farm by farm, to the upbuilding 
of the cities of the nation. The unfold- 
ing picture of this farm community’s 
impact upon the nation’s life during 
the century just passed is precisely 
the thing many persons have looked for 


[27] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


to put national meaning into the daily 
disappearance from the farms of the 
surplus of young adults which every 
few years amounts to a strong small 
nation poured into -city industry. 

I cannot pass this remarkable study 
by without naming some of the men 
who as “exportable surplus” left the old 
farmstead to work out careers in cities. 
I will name only those whom you know, 
and know to honor. You remember 
Governor George Peck of Wisconsin. 
You knew him as the Peck of “Peck’s 
Bad Boy.” Farm number 555 among 
these thousand farms gave Governor 
Peck to Wisconsin. Governor Reuben 
Wood of Ohio came from farm num- 
ber 119. Governor Cushman Davis, 
of Minnesota, afterward United States 
Senator, was the product of farm num- 
ber 556, just as much as the wheat 


[28] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


from that farm was a product and went 
into national trade. Farm number 618 
gave Charles Finney to American 
Christendom and to Oberlin College 
as its honored president. Farm num- 
ber 701 raised Charles N. Crittenton, 
gave him to the wholesale drug busi- 
ness in New York City, in which he ac- 
cumulated wealth with which he put 
into operation his ideal for friendless 
girls. The Florence Crittenton Res- 
cue Homes for girls in seventy-two 
cities of the United States tells his 
story. One of the little hamlets in the 
community produced Daniel Burnham, 
America’s leading architect, at home 
equally in Chicago, New York, or 
Rome, Italy. 

But these brighter lights of the exo- 
dus do not by any means convey what 
is perhaps after all the greater in- 


[29] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


fluence and might of the majority of 
the human surplus who went forth and 
found their places and played their 
roles as less widely known personalities 
in enterprises of banking, manufac- 
ture, teaching, or merchandizing, where 
they helped weave the fabric of 
America and its institutions as we 
know them in every-day life. 

The force of this plain story of the 
human product of good farms, in a 
community where God was known, 
hes not in what might be considered the 
exceptional character of the commun- 
ity, but rather in the fact that the story 
of this particular community of farms 
is the story, in one respect or another, 
of all American farm communities. 
This study convinces both men of the 
farms and men of the cities,—as it sets 
their memories to work about the mi- 


[30] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


grants from the land whom they have 
known—that as the farming communi- 
ties wax or wane, so wax or wane the 
cities and the nation. 


Many Children Virtual Pagans 


AND here an unsuspected villain en- 
ters my story. Do not laugh in your | 
sleeve when you discover that the villain 
is a fact, merely a fact; but, by the by, 
_a very stubborn and blistering fact. 
Of the fifteen millions of farm child- 
ren—children under twenty-one years 
of age,—more than four millions are 
virtual pagans, children without knowl- 
edge of God. If, perchance, they 
know the words to curse with, they do 
not know the Word to live by. This 
saddening fact is the solemn disclos- 
ure of the recent study, already 
mentioned, made by the Social and Re- 


[31] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ligious Institute of New York City. 

A survey of 179 counties in the 
United States, representatively  se- 
lected, enables the Institute with con- 
fidence to assert that “1,600,000 farm 
children live in communities where 
there is no church or Sunday-school 
of any denomination,” and “probably 
2,750,000 more who do not go to any 
Sunday-school, either because the 
church to which their parents belong 
does not have any, or because they do 
not care to connect themselves with such 
an organization.” 

One does not get the real inwardness 
of this fact until one appreciates that 
these 1,600,000 of pagan children are 
not scattered evenly, or more or less 
evenly, among the other millions of 
children who are in contact with the 
Bible, but are in a great measure homed 


[32] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


in bibleless, godless communities. The 
nation might possibly assimilate a mil- 
lion bibleless children if they were 
brought up among several millions of 
children who know the concepts of 
religion; but absorbing godless chil- 
dren in great numbers from whole god- 
less groups is a bird of a different 
feather. What is still more discon- 
certing, the trend, we are led to sup- 
pose, is not from bad to better, but 
from bad to worse. 

“There is no national passion for 
seeking out the godless community 
and setting the Bible there,” we hear 
on every hand. 

“The promoters of Bible study are 
too apologetic to business, to education, 
to pleasure, even, and go not about 
their tasks as those who have a com- 
mission from the nation,” many say. 


[33] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


But these bare statements fail, per- 
haps, to get hold of us. We must have 
particulars and the pulse of the thing. 
And so I wish to take a page out 
of my own experience and let you 
read it. 


Trapped in a Godless Community 


My putts, a while back, took me into 
the clover-bearing hills of a promising 
county in a dairy State. I stayed the 
night with a farmer’s family, enjoying 
the hospitality and confidences of the 
home. Never shall I forget two epi- 
sodes of the evening. | 

The milking was finally over—twelve 
mighty good cows. I had been allowed 
to milk three, taking the mother’s place 
on her favorite milking-stool. Certain 
cows were ‘tender’ and responded 
kindly to her gentler touch. 

[34] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


The house was on a side hill sloping 
steeply to the road, and across the road 
was a thinly timbered twenty-acre lot. 
The warm milk had been poured into 
ten-gallon cans and carried up to the 
house, where stood, in a neat little 
milk-house, a cream separator. When 
all was ready, the separator began to 
sing, the cream came trickling out, the 
skim-milk poured into a _ ten-gallon 
can, as the gaunt six-foot-three, 
narrow-shouldered farmer, turned the 
crank. At the first whirring tune-up 
of the separator, I hear a scurrying 
of feet in the timber lot below, and 
soon a regiment of hogs and pigs were 
at the fence, standing with hind feet 
in the long trough, front feet over the 
top rail of the fence, black heads in a 
row, beady little eyes peering up the 
hill, open mouths giving vent to a long- 


[35] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


drawn squeal of jubilant petition. As 
the whir of the separator grew into a 
liquid hum, the squealing chorus rose 
to heaven, filling the valley, investing 
the farm, like a piece of symbolism, 
with the imperious demands of animals 
and crops upon the total energies of 
the family. Finally the last drop of 
milk went through the _ separator. 
Then the father put his hands to two 
handles of two ten-gallon cans of skim- 
milk; one son grasped the other handle 
of one can; another son caught hold 
of the handle of the second can; while 
each son in his remaining hand held a 
pail of the milk. Then they three, 
with two cans and two brimming pails, 
took up their stately march abreast 
down the hill to the squealing chorus 
at the trough. It looked for all the 
[36] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


world like some priestly ritual. The 
milk was poured into the trough. The 
pigs ceased to chant and began to 
suck, guzzle, push, and grunt. So the 
day’s work was over, and we sought 
the house. Darkness fell over the hill 
and valley and the filled pigs lay down 
to sleep; while the farmer gathered his 
family about him, took up his Bible 
and read the Scriptures, even as did 
the cotter, whom Burns, the farmer 
Scot, made us know: 


The priest-like father reads the sacred page, 
How Abram was the friend of God on 
high ; 
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage 
With Amalek’s ungracious progeny ; 
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie 
Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging 
ire ; 


[37] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 
ET eS TY 


Or Job’s pathetic plaint and wailing cry; 
Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire; 
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred 
lyre. 


Conversation in the morning 
brought out the fact that this hillside 
home was virtually the only one, in 
this clover community, struggling to 
bring up its children in the knowledge 
of God. No church, no Sunday- 
school, no parochial school, no Bible 
class. The gaunt father, gathering 
emotion as he overheard his own story, 
said: 

“TI have only one problem now. In 
twelve years my cows and hogs have 
paid for themselves, paid for my farm, 
built my barn and house. ‘The one 
problem is not money any longer, but 
it is my boys and girls. They are just 

[38] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


now at the point where the home can 
no longer hold them, and they will, I 
fear, sink into the mire of this godless 
community.” 

“What do you mean, ‘mire’?” I in- 
quired. 

“Well, it is hard to put into words,” 
he continued. “Perhaps this will give 
you some idea: since I have been here, 
now twelve years, not a wedding has 
taken place anywhere hereabouts that 
has not been forced. And this is not 
the worst of it.” 

“Why don’t you start a Sunday- 
school?” I urged. 

“Too late!’ he sighed. “My chil- 
dren are almost beyond me. I was, I 
fear, too busy with my cows and pigs, 
and the children just grew up before 
I knew it.” 

“What will you do?’ I could not 

[39] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


refrain from asking, more to myself 
than to him, in my own perplexity, as 
I tried to share in the problem. 

“The only thing I can do,” said he, 
as if the conversation had strengthened 
a previous resolution half-heartedly 
entertained, “is to yield to my wife’s 
judgment; sell the farm, go to some 
safe community where there is a 
church, Sunday-school, and a_ high 
school. We people here in_ this 
community made our great mistake in 
starting out wrong. We made a 
religion of our pure-bred hogs and 
cattle, and let our boys and girls go to 
the dogs.” 

This tale of children, who turned 
out to have been unwittingly side- 
tracked by cows and hogs, recalled my 
own experience in breaking some new 
land in the Skims at a period in my 

[40] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


life when the doctor had said: “What 
you need is to get close to the land. 
Crawl around on the soil a year or two 
and you will learn over again how to 
sleep.”’ 

Well, with my old horse The Cid 
and a mail-order one-horse plow, I 
went through the motions of plowing 
that pine cut-over from which the pines 
had been skimmed off like cream from 
a milk-pan. Surveying the scratched 
and torn field, somewhat bruised and 
bleeding, I will declare it was, I said 
to myself : 

“It does n’t look really plowed; but 
it will be all right when I get it drag- 
ged.” 

Then The Cid did his very best at 
dragging. Dutifully—with an inner 
chuckle, I am sure, at my green 
expectations, for he was a seasoned 


[41] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


old Skims horse himself—he plodded 
along and over the field. At last I 
stood sweating and weary, looking it 
over, and was obliged to own up: 

“It doesn’t look dragged; but it will 
be all right when I get it cultivated.” 

I went through the form of marking 
and planting, and though I could n’t 
see the rows very well, I quieted my 
discontent by saying to myself, “It will 
be all right when I get it hoed.” 

But when the corn came up, it was 
accompanied by such a community of 
weeds, briers, grass, and small bushes, 
that I couldn’t cultivate because I 
could n’t see the corn. 

After I had in much perplexity 
stared at the cultivator and then at 
the field, I looked that piece of work 
square in the face and averred: 

“If I ever plow again, I am not 


[42] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


going to kid myself into thinking that 
the cultivator will straighten out the 
sins of the plow.” 

This raw-boned farmer and his wife, 
possessed of the fairest intentions in 
the world for their children, had 
become trapped in a godless commu- 
nity before they were aware of it; all 
because the seed-bed of human life had 
not been plowed deep with social 
religion at the very outset. Is this 
community a fair example of bibleless 
country groups? I believe it is. I 
am sorry to admit it, but I believe it is 
a fair type. 


When the Bible Has No Interpreter 


IF a nation can not build civilization 
securely without a knowledge of his- 


tory, neither can children build charac- | 


ter without a knowledge of those men 


[43 ] 


| 


; 


By 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


and women of history who have es- 
sayed to know God. The Bible is the 
story of such persons. It is biogra- 
phy. It is lives of those in whom the 
soul of man in his search for God has 
risen to its highest levels. There is no 
substitute for this Bible biography,— 
except, if you please, another, Bible. 
And perhaps, in point of Bible 
illiteracy, next to the community which 
has no Bible in it, lies the community 
in which, though there is a Bible, the 
leaders in teaching the Bible, or rather 
in explaining the Bible to the children, 
are themselves grossly ignorant, if not 
demoralized. The Bible is a book of 
many stories, of a host of incidents, of 
innumerable ideas. Selection is vital. 
To select from the Bible and hand on 
its meaning in grave ignorance is to 
run the risk that all ignorance runs. 


[44] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Here is where many a rural community 
suffers, when it is commonly thought 
to be provided with a knowledge of 
God. 

It fell to my lot recently to visit a 
small rural community of twenty-five 
families of this type. Only three of 
the families were totally ' without 
church connections, or at least church 
traditions. One church building has 
fallen in. One lies torn down. The 
third, still standing, is rotting. It is 
supposed to be “haunted.” Splits dis- 
organized and discouraged the people. 
A fourth rude church structure has 
come, but splitting up from within has 
begun. Ignorance of a crass sort 
rules. The Bible has had no well- 
balanced soul to interpret its wonder- 
ful truths. 

The family histories of this settle- 

[45] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ment run—to speak very grimly 
indeed—like an anthology of despair 
and depravity. Listen: 

“She drowned her babies regularly 
in the creek.” 

“He was said to be the father of his 
own daughter’s first child.” 

“This woman was subnormal and 
has three illegitimate children.” 

“This other woman is a menace to 
every man in the community.” 

“He committed suicide.” 

“She poured kerosene on the cat and 
set fire to it.” 

“Boil nails in water to find out if 
person for which water is named com- 
mitted a crime. If nails crackle and 
knock against the pan, then person 
named is guilty.” 

“A person dies hard on feathers. 


We took mother’s bed out from under 
[46] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


her three times when we thought she 
was dying.” 

“Our children don’t need to go to 
school to learn to read. The Spirit 
teaches them to read.” 

The people of these families looked, 
in the face, like people you meet in 
any fair group of folks; but their 
minds, their deeds, their hopes, their 
fears! There’s the rub. Is _ this 
group of twenty-five families typical 
of country communities where the 
Bible is fought over by blind leaders 
of the blind? I am afraid it is. I 
admit it with shame, but I admit it. 
The Bible,—as if it were a plow found 
by persons who knew not its use, but 
who scrapped hard for its possession as 
an ornament of their dooryards,—the 
life-giving Bible in these hands is still 
a closed book and a locked-up treasure. 


[47] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





Pedigreed Austerity Better Than 
Ignorance 


Human life at its best is no mere ac- 
cident which may happen anywhere 
under any conditions. The best has 
its pedigree. It is the result of infinite 
pains with children as with crops and 
animals. Even the austere, narrow- 
gaged leadership having a pedigree is 
far better than this ignorant, illiterate 
type. 

I remember well as a lad how my 
father, a country minister, collegebred 
and trained in the theological school of 
his particular denominational stripe, 
stood rock-like in his parish for 
temperance. It was a grape country, 
with several wine distilleries. My 
father taught abstention from wine- 
drinking and preached against the 

[48] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


distilleries. One church pillar was in 
the wine business and furnished the 
sacramental wine. My father finally 
carried his logic to the point where he 
made announcement: 

“Next Sunday at the Communion 
we shall not use fermented wine.” 

Sunday came. A larger congre- 
gation than usual assembled. There 
was a tenseness of silent emotion in the 
stiff Sunday-dressed village and 
farmer folk, which I can feel yet, after 
forty years. | 

The communion-table was set. I 
see my father now, as he picked up the 
flagon of wine and poured into the 
chalice. He paused—on his face a 
sudden look of bewilderment. Then 
slowly he poured the chalice of wine 
back into the flagon, strode to the door, 
and emptied the contents on the 


[49] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ground. Quietly resuming the cere- 
mony he said: 

“We will commune without wine to- 
day.” 

The distiller had done his dirty work 
and put one over on the country 
parson. But the parson, although he 
caused a sense of consternation to 
creep over the church folk,—akin to 
the horror in the multitude when 
Count Antonio, in Anthony Hope’s 
tonic story, laid hands on the Sacred 
Bones in midstream,—by this daring 
act helped plug the bung-holes and 
spike the spigots in the cellars of that 
county. And the whole countryside, 
be it said, responded to the resolute will 
of my father to make God known to a 
community steeped in wine. 

My father probably shared the 
narrow-mindedness of his particular 


[50] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


pedigree, but he certainly hewed to the 
line like a prophet of old. His crop 
of young converts came usually in 
winter; but the snow and ice had no 
deterring chill for him. He never 
thought of postponing the baptismal 
rite till summer. He had a large hole 
cut through in the little river near by, 
for water helped mightily in his system 
of doctrine. He didn’t spare me 
either. At eleven years of age, he led 
me, as he did my country playmates, 
out of the sleigh, down the snowbank, 
into this ice-water. There was no 
softening of the ideals of life in that 
parish, I can tell you. And the God 
of Daniel was known and acknowl- 
edged there in fear and trembling. 
When, in after years it fell to my 
fortune to live on the Skims and to woo 
sleep with logging, stumping, and 
[51] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


“scratching” the land, I saw what a 
real Sunday-school would do even in 
a submarginal community for the 
children of the pine cut-over. There 
was the farmer widow woman with the 
man’s hands. What would have been 
her chances of rearing her seven 
children to usefulness and self-respect 
without that weekly community-school 
under good leadership? 

I hear again her breezy, cheery call 
to her brood as she drives up to the 
hittle church. 

“Pile out.” 

“Pile in,” when Sunday-school is 
over. 

A slap of the lines, and a piece of 
rural America goes back to its cabin, 
minds sprayed with race lore. <A 
mighty wholesome sight in a commu- 
nity of tools with broken handles, of 

[52] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


harnesses toggled with hay-wire, of 
fortunes “busted’’, of the blind, and of 
those who could not sleep. 

There was the old retired farmer, 
Scotch McDugle, too, eighty years old. 
He would come over from next door 
of an evening and swap Skims stories 
for a cheery welcome and a listening 
ear. It would be midwinter. The 
sheet-iron stove showed red. 

“Come in, Mr. McDugle,” my wife 
would say. “Take off your hat and 
mittens.” 

“Oh, no, no,” he would reply, “just 
stepped in to say ‘howdy.’ Can’t stay 
a minute.” 

Then McDugle would settle down 
for the evening close to the red-hot 
stove, mittens drawn tight, Scotch cap 
pulled close down over his ears. As 
he got limbered in memory, he would 


[53] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


go through a set of queer antics with 
his lips and tongue—little dry, staccato 
sputters. He reminded me in this of a 
courtly neurasthene I once met who | 
said, as he went through similar tongue 
motions, “I beg your pardon, but I 
have a hair on the tip of my tongue 
which I seem never able to get off.” 

Farmer McDugle’s favorite theme 
was the making of great American 
men out of “hard knocks” and “a good 
pinch of God.” He reveled in 
Lincoln, whom he had known; and 
he never got tired of weaving the peo- 
ple he knew in with the race-heroes of 
all time. 

As I think of McDugle and his ilk 
in these later days, I can not help 
suspecting that bleak little Scotland 
and God in the life, despite the stain 

[54] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


of the “wee drap o’rye,” account for 
many of America’s man-making rural 
communities. 


' When Catholic and Protestant Agree 


Tue chairman of the Board of 
Directors of the National Catholic 
Rural Life Conference, in a call 
published (in the April 1924 number 
of “St. Isadore’s Plow’) for the 
second annual Catholic Rural Life 
Conference, says: 

“We have two distinct entities of 
population, and, we might say, of 
civilization in the United States—the 
urban and the rural. The church is 
decidedly urban. So far as the Church 
is concerned, the country towns and 
villages are still ‘pagani.’ ” 

Thus you see Protestant and 


[55] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Catholic agree in seeing the menace of 
rural paganism within the borders of 
Christian America. 

This is not the moment to settle the 
blame for this condition on any per- 
sons or sects. It is rather the time for 
a statesmanlike move to meet the 
menace. Bible instruction of worth, 
dignity, intelligence, in every commu- 
nity, made accessible to the last child, 
is an aim which alone can meet the 
case. But this is an herculean stunt, 
and requires some of the same sweep 
of codperative, universal momentum 
as drove out yellow fever, malaria, and 
is fighting pellagra, hook-worm, and 
tuberculosis. Bible illiteracy ranks as 
a problem with book illiteracy; and as 
great a unanimity is required to root it 
out as to eradicate book illiteracy. A 
hundred different religious bodies in 


[56] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the United States have striven more 
or less fitfully in the past with this, 
problem. But far more is needed than 
the hundred-headed effort. When, in 
the late war, the Allies came to their 
senses and found that their struggle 
was not a rope-pull nor, a barbecue, 
but a life-or-death struggle, they 
elected Foch to give universality of 
will to the cause of defense. 

The children of rural America 
deserve by good rights a Foch to lead 
the forces of Bible literacy against a 
creeping, godless paganism. I have 
refrained from presenting the religious 
case for this crusade. The menace is 
so great that the social appeal should 
be sufficient—and should reach every 
intelligent lover, of America, be he 
fundamentalist, modernist, ethicist, or 
just plain man. 


[57] 


CHAPTR III 


ILLIAM JAMES, the Har- 

vard psychologist, used to 
say in his class-room: “I must 
fight the devil and his wiles, for 
God needs me. I may help save the 
day.” 

In the same room, the next hour, 
Josiah Royce, the philosopher, would | 
say, “I must set my heel on Satan’s 
neck, for God’s victorious spirit is in 
Mme.,) 

Whichever, of these two schools of 
moral action one belongs to, one is 
bound, you see, to fight the devil and 
his guile; and in country life this is no 

[58] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


joke, for as it turns out, the devil 
waved a mighty wicked wand over the 
American farm tenant when he jock- 
eyed him on to the land into the shoes 
of the departing farm owner. It was 
a devilish, cunning trick to decoy the 
owner, body and soul, into town and 
into the town church—away from the 
little country church of his fathers. It 
was, however, the meanest lick of 
Satan against the peace of the tenant 
to bewitch him into flitting from farm 
to farm and from community to 
community. And now the situation 
has come to such a pass that, unless 
the American church has the grace and 
backbone and subtlety to outgeneral 
the devil in his game, the devil wins; 
for in matters of religion, the landless 
man is between the devil and the deep 
sea. 


[59] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


“Churches Detour—Tenants Ahead’ 


It 1s old stuff, in a way, this cheerless 
story of farm tenants and religion. 
Pick up, as I have done, either at 
random or quite methodically, book- 
lets, chapters, articles, or pamphlets 
dealing at first hand with the farm 
tenant, and the tale of his religious 
handicap runs drearily, hopelessly to 
the same sad end. For example, take 
this rather mild statement from a 
member of Roosevelt’s Country Life 
Commission: | 

“The farm owner who has moved to 
town and is renting his land cannot be 
expected to be a real, vital force in 
the rural church. Nor can the tenant 
who has a one-year lease, or whose 
tenure is uncertain, be expected to 
cultivate the Christian graces by 

[60] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


intimate fellowship with his neighbors 
and associates; in other words, to take 
root in the community and become a 
part of it.” 

“Why, then,” it will be asked, “try 
to dress up the outworn subject 
again?” 

The plain answer, without any 
apology, is simply this: The farm- 
tenant case, as a phase of religion in 
eclipse, has not yet cast an image on 
the American mind. The American 
church,—and I class together all the 
Christian bodies in this sweeping term, 
—the Christian conscience of the 
American church has apparently re- 
versed itself and ‘“‘passed by on the 
other side” of this bedeviled situation. 
Now such an attitude, such collective 
behavior, is ruthless, well nigh unfor- 
givable, and in fact incomprehensible. 


[61] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Words must continue to be spoken 
until the church ceases to detour 
around the tenant. 


The Flood of Tenancy Unabated 


Anp first of all, in order to see the 
gravity of the case as it stands, one 
must sense the resistless character of 
the sweeping flow of tenancy itself. 
Decade by decade the flood has risen. 
In 1880, 25.6 per cent. of the farms in 
the United States were tenant farms; 
in 1890, 28.4 per cent.; in 1900, 35.3 
per cent.; in 1910, 37.0 per cent.; in 
1920, 38.1 per cent. 

If one looks a little closer at the 
regions where the flood is highest— 
almost over the dikes, so to speak—the 
truth strikes home a little stronger. In 
the east South-central States, contain- 
ing Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, 


[62] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Mississippi, the percentage in 1880 
was 35.2; in 1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; 
in 1910, 52.8; in 1920, 49.6. In the 
west south-central area, containing Ar- 
kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, 
the percentage in 1880 was 35.2; in 
1890, 38.6; in 1900, 49.1; in 1910, 52.8; 
in 1920, 538.2. In the west north- 
central area, containing, as a very vital 
part of American agriculture, Minne- 
sota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, 
South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, the 
percentage in 1880 was 20.5; in 1890, 
24.0; in 1900, 28.6; in 1910, 30.0; in 
1920, 34.1. 

_ When the United States Census 
Report for 1920 came out and was 
scanned, it was discovered by every one 
that in the decade between 1910 and 
1920 the flood of tenant farms had in 
number gone down in some States a 


[63] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


little, as in Alabama and Mississippi, a 
fact which brought a decline in the east 
south-central area from 52.8 per cent. 
in 1910 to 49.6 per cent. in 1920. But 
lest the friends of agriculture in 
America should be put under ether by 
this disclosure, Dr. C. L. Stewart, now 
professor in the University of Illinois, 
while a member of the United States 
Department of Agriculture, in a state- 
ment entitled, “The Persistent In- 
crease of Tenant Farming,” called 
attention to the fact that the bare num- 
ber of tenant farms is a less accurate 
index of the sweep and meaning of 
tenancy than the acreage involved and 
the value of that acreage: 

“When measured on the basis of 
acreage and value, the number of 
rented acres per thousand and the num- 
ber of dollar’s worth of rented land per 


[64] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


thousand was not only higher (in 1910 
and 1920) than that shown on the pre- 
ceding basis (number of rented farms), 
but has been growing at much faster 
rates during both of the decades since 
1900, especially during the decade just 
ended. . . . In the light of this analy- 
sis, the tide of tenancy is shown by the 
latest census to have continued with 
little or no abatement.” 

In sober truth, this flood-tide of ten- 
ancy is no mere passing phenomenon 
in the adolescent experience of Amer- 
ica, but is a settled characteristic now 
being wrought into the texture of 
American life. As a social and eco- 
nomic force, tenancy is here to stay. 
Statesmen may well build their dikes 
higher against it; but American relig- 
ious Jeaders—the makers of ecclesi- 
astical policy—must from now on 


[65] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


gravely take farm tenancy into their 
reckoning, or assume spiritual respon- 
sibility for its continued religionless 
character. 


Locating the Devil’s Quarry 


Ler us draw a bit closer to these tenant 
folks and look them in the eyes. ‘There 
they are, in round numbers two and a 
half millions of tenant operators; or, 
perhaps, better reckoned for our pur- 
pose as twelve millions of people, 
counting all persons in the tenant fam- 
ilies both old and, young. But, as al- 
most everybody knows, there are a few 
vast differences among tenants, and we 
must sift a little and sort out the group 
that the devil is laying his finger on 
and claiming as his own. 

A tenant who is a son or daughter 
of the landlord, or otherwise related to 


[66] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the landlord by blood or marriage, is 
without question not only a privileged 
person and his family a_ privileged 
family among tenants, but, what is more 
to the point, living on family lands as 
he most generally does, the “related 
tenant” is so often an owner in pros- 
pect with a deed “in escrow” as the 
law would put it, that while nomin- 
ally a tenant, he is an owner in thin 
disguise, and virtually has in the com- 
munity the status of an owner. The 
census does not declare what percent- 
age of the twelve millions of tenant 
folk belongs to this favored class; but 
whatever the percentage is, it is ob- 
viously decreasing with the decreasing 
percentage of owner-operating fam- 
ilies. Representative studies made by 
the United States Department of Ag- 
riculture indicate that 23 per cent. of 


[67] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the tenant population belongs at pres- 
ent to this group. If we accept this 
estimate, then, in 1920, there were 
2,760,000 persons in the families of 
“related tenants.” 

To protect my story against the will 
to exaggerate the landless element, 
let us call the total number of “related 
tenants” three millions; and then let 
us deduct this whole group from the 
twelve millions of tenant folks. This 
leaves nine millions of tenants unpriv- 
ileged by birth or marriage in respect 
to land. 

Lest any one should feel, further- 
more, that I am trying to make, under 
cover, a case of the colored tenant,— 
whose situation is confessedly special 
and should not, for obvious reasons, be 
confused with that of white tenants,— 
let us sift and sort again and take out 


[68] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


three and a half millions of colored ten- 
ant folk, old and young. ‘The resid- 
uum is five and a half millions of white 
tenants. This is the group that has 
swelled in numbers during the past 
four decades. This is the group that is 
all the time spreading over more and 
more acres, all the time creeping on to | 
more and more valuable land. This 
group of landless men, women, and 
children (I do not mean to say that this 
is the only landless group of white 
farm people, for the agricultural-labor 
class makes another story), occupying 
more and more the strategic positions 
in agriculture and country life, con- 
tains the devil’s quarry. 


Tenants On the Go 


WE must add one more particularly 
distressing feature to our general pic- 


[69] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ture. In December and January in 
the South, or in March in the North, 
there is a great stir among these ten- 
ants, for moving-time has come. Dur- 
ing the year between December 1, 
1921, and December 1, 1922, according 
to a statement put out by the U. S. 
Department of Agriculture, entitled, 
“Farm Occupancy, Ownership, and 
Tenancy, 1922,” “nearly 663,000 shifts 
on farms exchanging tenants” oc- 
curred of which “nearly 250,000 ten- 
ants were indicated to have either dis- 
continued farming for some other 
occupation or moved out of their com- 
munities.” | 

In this exodus, poverty tags along, 
poverty carrying in her apron all the 
witch’s ills—hard luck, dimmed lights 
of the mind, illness, inferiority writ- 
ten in behavior, stolid despair, indiffer- 


[70] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ence to improvement, insensibility to 
refinements. In the South, poverty 
hangs on to the coat-tails of the “Crop- 
per’—him of the lowest estate of the 
tenant. In 1920, according to the 
United States Census Report, there 
were 227,378 white croppers, more than 
one million white cropper folk. 
Behold a host, comparable with the 
host of Israel on the way to Canaan. 
The roads are filled with teams, with 
jags of household belongings, with led 
_ or driven cattle, horses and mules, with 
loads of women and children. <A small 
nation is folding its tents and moving 
on ere its tents have fairly got pitched. 
White tenants alone,—and mind you, 
out of the group of five and a half mil- 
lions of landless people,—an army of 
1,375,000 souls; and of these, more 
than a half a million going across the 


[71] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


border of the community into a strange 
land for another short sojourn. This 
is the picture you will see every year— 
over a quarter of all tenants moving, 
and ten per cent. of all tenants mov- 
ing into strange associations among 
strange people. 


Outcasts From the Church 


In THEIR recent study, ‘““The Town and 
Country Church,’ Dr. H. N. Morse 
and Dr. de S. Brunner, of the Institute 
of Social and Religious Research, have 
this convincing word to say about the 
church and the farm tenant: 

“The church in the country areas is 
not, generally speaking, the church of 
the landless man. In a study of all 
the churches in 179 counties, located in 
44. States, the situation, which we be- 
lieve is reliably representative of con- 


[72] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





ditions in the United States as a whole, 
is this: ‘The percentage of farm own- 
ers who are members of churches in the 
South is 59.5, while of tenants who 
are members the percentage is 33.5; in 
the Southwest, of owners, 26.2, while 
of tenants, 9.2; in the Northwest, of 
owners, 16.4, while of tenants, 7.4; in~ 
the Middle West, of owners, 47.9, while 
of tenants, 20.3; in the Prairie, of own- 
ers, 55.6, while of tenants, 15.8.” 

These two authorities on the farm- 
er’s church, draw from their study 
of the high and low tenancy areas in 
175 counties this further conclusion: 
“The larger the proportion of farm 
tenants in an area, the more conspic- 
uously unreached by the church is the 
landless man.” Here are their fig- 
ures, see for yourself: 

“In counties where tenancy runs 


[73] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


[oes ones oeencepcesteeacnninaieasuiatemardaiaesneeny apaetioesmeapeemaniapeinidareasmraaeieeaeaaaeme tam tagemeaeeeseneaaeel 
from 0 to 10 per cent., the percentage 
of farm owners who are church mem- 
bers is 13.7, while the percentage of 
tenants who are church members is 
12.4; where tenancy runs from 11 to 25 
per cent., the percentage of owners as 
church members, is 26.8, while of ten- 
ants, 19.8; where tenancy runs from 26 
to 50 per cent., the percentage of 
owners is 48.2, while of tenants, 23.6; 
where tenancy runs over 50 per cent., 
the percentage of owners who are 
church members is 63.6, while the per- 
centage of tenants who are church 
members is 23.9.” 

When we look: into this statement, 
it is plain that in the low tenancy areas 
the “related tenants” on “family lands” 
bulk large, and they rank, as we know, 
with owners themselves; but when we 
get into the high tenancy areas, we 


[74] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


strike the core of tenants unrelated to 
the landlord. Here is the mass of 
our 5,500,000 landless tenant folk, and 
here is where the church has weakened 
and fallen down. Five millions of 
these white landless tenants are in the 
high tenancy areas. And applying 
this church study to our problem, while 
the church reaches 55 per cent. of 
the owners in these areas it reaches 
only 24 per cent. of the tenants. 
That is, 1,200,000 of these landless 
_ tenants only are inside the circle of 
direct religious influence, and 3,800,- 
000 are outside. If these 5,000,000 
persons had been owners of land, or in- 
heritors of land in waiting, the church 
would have reached 2,750,000 of them 
instead of 1,200,000; in other words 
here are 1,550,000 tenant people who 
are outcasts from the church simply be- 


[75] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


cause they are landless folk. And 
these outcasts—these religionless par- 
iahs—are on the increase from year to 
year as tenancy increases its hold upon 
the nation. 


One Hundred Per Cent. Material 
for Religion 


Ir suRELYy will not be misunderstood 
if a layman should call to mind that the 
genius of Christianity is its perennial 
Gospel—just good news—to the poor, 
the broken in life’s struggle. If a fit- 
ter multitude than these tenants for 
the good tidings of the Christ can be 
found on the face of the earth, I would 
like to learn of them. The ordinary 
life of these outcasts, these wanderers 
from spot to spot seeking the sun that 
refuses to shine, has precisely all of 
those breakdowns which the Christian 
[76] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


religion promises to repair—poverty, 
invalidism, death, sin. It seems to me 
that these pariahs are just naturally 
made to order for the kind of religion 
that the American church has to offer; 
but as I see it, and I have looked this 
thing in the face from angle after | 
angle, they haven’t got a ghost of a 
show at it the way the church system — 
of the country at present works out. 
Speaking straight from the shoulder, 
the devil wins, unless— And where is 
_ the person who will rise and name the 
great “unless” that can fix this church 
system up and set the heel of the 
church on Satan’s neck? 

The history of the church, running 
back through the centuries, is, as I read 
it, dotted with awakenings, with the 
rise of a thought, of a hope-dream, 
with the rise of a man who out of the — 


[77] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


very fog and blackness of popular 
waywardness, wantonness, unbelief, 
depravity, has stood up and _ success- 
fully denied that human life must be 
all to the strong and that the poor must 
live unillumined. This has been the 
type of man who has lit the torch of 
love and solicitude and faith in the 
world that has lighted the race genera- 
tion after generation. Is this not the 
time in the life of the American church 
and this the occasion in America for 
such a man to arise and call a halt upon 
the detour of the church around the 
farm tenant? 


[78] 


CHAPTER IV 


: IRELING!” A sour epithet to 
hand a preacher; but the word is 
not mine. Look at it, if you will, in its — 
original setting and judge for your- 
self: 
“I am the good shepherd; the good 
shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. 
_ But he that is an hireling, and not the 
shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, 
seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the 
sheep, and fleeth. ... The hireling 
fleeth, because he is an hireling, and 
careth not for the sheep.” 
So spake the Man of Sorrows, who, 
as he went about preaching the Gospel 
of the Kingdom, spake as never man 


[79] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





spake. And nineteen centuries of un- 
broken Christian usage look down upon 
“pastor and flock” as an almost perfect 
characterization of preacher and par- 
ish. Passing quickly through the 
gateway leading up to the porch of my 
tale, let me in a few words taken from 
“Town and Country Church in the 
United States,” set before you the 
pastor-and-flock-hard-luck story in ru- 
ral America: 

“The total number of communities 
within the town (town refers to places 
of 5,000 people or less) and country 
area is 73,230.” 

“There are 33,808 communities, or 
42 per cent. of the total number, that 
have churches, but do not have within 
them any resident pastors.” 

“Tt would require 34,181 more min- 


[80] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


isters giving their full time to the work 
of the ministry to provide one for each 
community, if they were evenly distrib- 
uted.” 

“The great advantage of the town 
over the village, and of both town and 
village over the country, in the matter 
of resident pastors, is a characteristic 
of all regions and of virtually all coun- | 
ties. Thus, while 78 out of every 100 
town churches have resident pastors, 
and 60 out of every 100 village 
churches, only 17 out of every 100 
country churches have them, and less 
than 5 out of every 100 country 
churches have full-time resident pas- 
tors.” 

In a nutshell, this is the inglorious 
fact: 80,000 flocks in rural America 
have no shepherds. Thirty thousand 

[81] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


rural flocks are open to the wolf—be- 
cause (for it so appears) American 
preachers care not for country sheep. 


Sentenced to Purgatory 


AN EMINENT rural-life leader a few 
weeks ago came back from a country- 
life conference of rural ministers, re- 
porting that these ministers had a say- 
ing among them, “A country charge 
(pastorate) is a sentence to purga- 
tory.” 

This report sounds like a piece of 
clerical humor; grim, maybe, but harm- 
less and meaning nothing. Would 
to God this were true! Then perhaps 
the picture of these 30,000 shepherdless 
flocks might turn out to be only a 
nightmare. I tried to shake the thing 
out of my mind; but immediately the 
long line of my ministerial acquaint- 


[82] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





ances passed unwillingly before me; 
and I solemnly affirm that, with a few 
princely exceptions, these men after 
being plunged into their ministry, 
coming up for air, as it were, faced to- 
ward the city parish as flowers turn 
toward the light; from the country, 
they struck out for the village; from 
the village, they struck out for the 
town; from the town, they struck out 
for the city; from the city, they struck 
out for the metropolis. 


The Preacher's Flight 


THE more I struggled to free my- 
self from a conclusion on this matter, 
the deeper into conviction I sank. I 
recalled, much against my inclination, 
a bad half-hour several years ago at 
the headquarters of one of the great 
religious bodies of America. The oc- 
[83] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 








casion was the meeting of the National 
Social Service Commission of that de- 
nomination. I had just finished read- 
ing a report, which expressed the idea 
that we might look forward to the day 
when country parishes would be put 
up in packages containing people 
enough supporting one church, so that 
churches in the country would be as 
powerful, ministers in the country 
would be as influential, as city churches, 
on the one hand, and city ministers 
on the other. A captain of city indus- 
try was a member of the commission. 
During my paper, hands in pockets, 
he paced the floor up and down—some- 
what to my discomfiture as I recall. 
When I concluded reading, he broke 
out with: 

“Bosh! All bosh! The country 
church will always be of little account. 


[84] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


osctseneselsonaesneensenmesedienisnteeseaeeesasienaeaniarcoisancaesssueseeineceaistesnadpeenssgreneins toteranmacnrenseesassagsepetnsiessiaeataesteaeenemian sera! 
It gets culls for ministers—it always 
has; it always will. Just as I left the 
farm for the city to improve my lot, 
so every country minister who can will 
leave the country parish for the city 
parish to improve his lot.” 

That I suffered a shock as if by 
lightning may easily be imagined. 
The steel-blue tone of this man did 
something to my heart; did something 
to my faith in human nature hard to de- 
fine. This captain of industry—and 
I suspect that this is what did the dam- 
age—never seemed to question the 
legitimacy of the preacher’s flight. 
Representing, as he did, the leading 
laymen of his denomination, quietly 
accepting the exodus of country 
preachers as_ perfectly normal—be- 
cause running true to the economics 
of good business instinct—he appalled 


[85] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





me with his cynicism. And it took me 
many a month, I confess, to get back 
my belief in humankind. But it came 
back, and came back strong in the fol- 
lowing manner: 


Around the Glover’s Cot 


By ACCIDENT, one summer, I made a 
find; in one of the 80,000 pastorless 
parishes, a man lying prone on a cot; 
the cot standing on a stone-boat; the 
stone-boat lying close to a deep pool 
in the bend of a little river, in the shade 
of a great elm-tree; the man all alone, 
flat on his back, silently whipping the 
trout-pool with his fly. I came to be- 
lieve in this helpless fisherman, and 
again all things good and _ beautiful 
seemed possible. I got the story from 
his sister, but can give only hints of 
it here. 


[86] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


As a boy on the farm he had made 
up his mind to get an education. At 
sixteen he was looking forward impa- 
tiently to beginning his courses of 
study, when one day in the woods a 
tree which the men folks were cutting 
down fell on him and broke his back. 
He never walked again, nor, in fact, 
ever again sat up. Doomed to lie on 
his back, all his hopes blighted, he 
asked for something to do with his 
hands. They gave him needle and 
thread, shears and a piece of buckskin. 
He made a pair of clumsy buckskin 
gloves. He made a less clumsy pair. 
He made pair after pair, better and 
still better. Then dozens of pairs, un- 
til his skill built up a small business. 
But his ambition mounted with suc- 
cess, and he asked whether he could n’t 
study something. 

[87] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


“Can’t I study law?” he pleaded. 

They got him law-books. He read 
law, he made buckskin gloves; he made 
gloves, he read law. He was admitted 
to the bar. He became justice-of-the- 
peace in his backwoods settlement. 
Men got to coming for miles to the 
glover’s cot to tell their troubles and 
look into his deep eyes, hear his counsel, 
and feel his glad hand. He was a real 
peacemaker under the guise of a law- 
yer. His ethics backed up to and 
rested upon the Sermon on the Mount. 
He bought land, hired it tilled, built 
himself a better house, and settled into 
the character of a country squire. He 
was of the little church flock, and the 
rest of the flock came to set great store 
by his good sense, his wholesome cheer, 
indomitable activity, and, withal, his 
straight reliance on God. In fact, the 

[88] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


helpless glover’s dwelling was the 
meeting-place for the flock about as 
often as the church building; for every- 
body said, “We get new strength to 
keep a-going when we meet around 
the cot.” 


The Modern Wolf a Playful Cub? 
SEE how I got back my faith? The 


prone fisherman on his stone-boat was 
a godsend to me. [I saw that personal 
life is so rich that no one can be broken 
in body to the point where, in case he 
“layeth down his life for the sheep,” he 
will be making a mean gift. I half sus- 
pect that God raises up out of the 
ground, as it were, in many of these 
pastorless communities a proxy for the 
parson that, beholding the wolf, leaveth 
the sheep and fleeth to the city—a 
proxy, like the glover-lawyer, who is no 


[89] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


quitter. And in some parishes where 
the preacher still sticks (his face set, 
however, toward the city) I fancy a 
man or a woman or a child can be found 
who is naively scaring off the wolf. 

Norris Shepardson was such a man. 
Farmer, poet, refined spirit, he went 
about his work making everybody 
believe that a new day is fresh from 
God. Ambrose Brimmer, a member of 
the community, didn’t happen to be 
much of a churchman, and his Sunday 
haymaking teased the parson mightily. 
I remember well one perfect trout 
day, when Ambrose was showing me the 
holes in a stream strange to my 
rod, that we got to talking about 
preachers. 

“I don’t care a damn if the parson 
does see me haying on Sunday,” said 
Ambrose; “but if I get a sight of 

[90] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Norris Shepardson driving up the 
road, I skedaddle and hide, you bet! 
You know Norris Shepardson. Well, 
Norris Shepardson is a Christian and 
no quack.” 

And Ambrose was right. Norris 
Shepardson was a Christian from his 
eyelashes to his finger-tips; and his 
sweet belief in you put you straightway 
under obligation to goodness when he 
cast a glance your way. 

It is probably true that I have been 
something of a modern-life fan. But 
when I try to think of the Master’s 
parables of the shepherd, the sheep, and 
the wolf, and of the one sheep that was 
lost while the ninety and nine were 
safe in the fold, I confess that IJ am 
troubled about my modern-life philos- 
ophy. | 

Are modern sheep any the less in 


[91] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


need of a downright shepherd because 
they are modern? 

Is n’t there a wolf any longer in times 
that are modern?) Or may he perhaps 
be just a playful cub? Or possibly, 
by this time, a toothless, plain, dodder- 
ing beastling? 

Has the age of lofty heroism in re- 
ligion—the age of sheer contempt of 
some of the traditional goods of life— 
clean passed away? And does eco- 
nomics furnish the better clue in 
modern days to those who are called of 
God to preach? 

Do we need‘ any 30,000 more 
preachers in the country trenches? 
Do we need any shock troops at all? 
Is n't it perfectly orthodox pacifism in 
these days for all the picked soldiers 
in the war on the devil to fall back into 
comfortable winter quarters? 


[92] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


Side-stepping the Law of Hire 

I try to find my answer to these 
troubling queries in a glance down the 
centuries. There are the barefoot 
Black Friars of Dominic and the Gray 
Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who 
took poverty for his bride) in the 
thirteenth century. They gloried in 
mean clothes, mean shelter, mean food, 
as they ministered out of their own 
poverty to the poor, the overlooked, 
the no-accounts (in cities, then, 
because the troop of comfortable 
parsons were fattening in the popular 
country districts). 

There are the visionaries and enthu- 
siasts: John Bunyan in the seven- 
teenth century; John and Charles 
Wesley in the eighteenth. In the very 
face of the plentiful, complacent 


[93] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 








clergy, they fought the wolf as if they 
had been apostles living in the first 
century. 

There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in 
the early part of the nineteenth 
century, who protested, “I do not wish 
to labor in some comfortable pastoral 
charge where I can be at ease. I want 
a work to do which no one else wishes 
to do, and which will not be done unless 
Pedo/ity 

Oberlin had just won his degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy at the Univer- 
sity of Strasburg, at a time when 
Strasburg was a city of France. His 
“call” to pastoral duty came all of a 
sudden with the wind of a February 
evening rushing in at the door as a 
stranger stepped into the bare room. 
Struck with the poverty of the place, 
Pastor Stuber introduced himself. 


[94] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





Beard’s translation from the French 
presents us with the picture: 

“I have learned about you, Herr 
Oberlin. Your name has been men- 
tioned to me as one who does not fol- 
low the beaten paths of ministerial 
candidates. You have studied surgery 
and medicine. You have a knowledge 
of botany and herbs. Is this not 
so?” 

“In my leisure hours I have paid 
some attention to botany, to blood- 
letting, and the experiences of the 
anatomical room,” replied Oberlin. 

“Will you be kind enough to explain 
to me what this little pan means that 
I see here by your lamp?” asked 
Stuber. 

A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s 
face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr 
Pastor. I take my dinner with my 


[95] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


parents, and I bring away some bread 
which my mother gives me. At eight 
o'clock I put this little pan over my 
lamp, place my bread in it, with a 
little water and salt. Then I go on 
with my studies.” 

“You are my man!’ exclaimed 
Stuber, rising from his chair. “You 
live on the diet of Lacedemon. Yes, 
you are my man. I see you do not 
understand me; but I have got my 
man, and I shall not let you go. I 
want you for the _ pastorship of 
Waldbach in the Ban-de-la-Roche. 
There a hundred poor and wretched 
families in want of the bread of life; 
four or five hundred to shepherd and to 
save, poor, wretched, friendless.”’ 

Oberlin’s heart was in a tumult. 
This was just the field of labor he had 
wished. But what of the difficulties? 

[96] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


“The parish must be in a very cold 
region,” suggested Oberlin. 

“My dear Oberlin, I do not wish to 
exaggerate anything. Six months of 
winter; at times the cold of the Baltic; 
sometimes a wind like ice comes down — 
from the mountain-tops above; the sick 
and dying are to be visited in remote, | 
wild, solitary places in the forests.” 

“And the parishioners, are they well 
disposed?” inquired Oberlin. 

“Not too much so, not too much. 
They are frightfully ignorant and un- 
tractable, and proud of their igno- 
rance. It is an iron-headed people, a 
population of Cyclops.” 

Oberlin was taking in the situation. 
He slowly lifted his large blue eyes 
and asked: ‘You say most of the 
parishioners are extremely poor? Are 
there resources to aid the poor?” 


[97] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 
_ SE SS STS TST. | 


“The parishioners have nothing. 
Four districts even poorer than the 
mother parish are to be served. Not 
a single practicable road. Deep mud- 
holes among the cabins. The people, 
abandoned to indifference, have not the 
least concern to meliorate their condi- 
tion.” 

“Every one of your words has 
knocked at the door of my heart like 
the blows of a hammer,” said Oberlin. 
And it was settled that Oberlin 
would go to the mountains; and on 
March 30, 1767, in his’ twenty- 
seventh year, Oberlin arrived at 
Waldbach. 

No single piece of literature equals 
the story of Jean Frederick Oberlin’s 
pastorate in the Ban-de-la-Roche as an 
interpretation of a country minister’s 
social, economic, and religious relation 


[98] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


to his parish. Overture after overture 
came to him during the years to give 
up his laborious cares in the hills and 
take charge of a church where cultured 
life would bring with it superior ad- 
vantages, greater recognized honor, ~ 
and a satisfactory salary. His answer 
was the same to all: 

“No, I will never leave this flock. 
God has confided this flock to me. 
Why should I abandon it?’ 

And in that out-of-the-way parish 
he played the shepherd and the man for 
nigh on to sixty years. Like the 
Venerable Bede in the eighth century, 
he died with the shepherd’s crook in his 
hand. 


Preachers’ Alibis Pass Inspection 


Now tell me, was Oberlin—remember 
he is only a hundred years away from 


[99] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 








our time—temperamental and_ab- 
surdly heroic? Was the nineteenth- 
century wolf any less tender with the 
nineteenth-century flock than the first- 
century wolf with the first-century 
flock? Is the modern ‘“world-the- 
flesh-and-the-devil” just a bugaboo to 
frighten children? Is modern sin a 
whiter stain on the soul and more easily 
washed out than in any previous cen- 
tury? It would take a braver man 
than I am to champion modern life to 
such lengths. 

These 30,000 runaway American 
preachers,—they all have good reasons 
for running. As alibis go, they are 
perfect—humanly speaking. I have 
often heard the recital: “Easier life 
for the wife,” “education for the child- 
ren,” “an American standard of liv- 

[100] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ing,” “congenial parish,’ “books,” 
“travel,” “art,” “greater opportunity 
for service.” 

Just such reasons as bankers, clerks, 
teachers, merchants give for their 
economic movements—to better them- 
selves, following the law of hire. And 
nobody protests; for nobody is in a 
position to protest, as the law of hire 
seems to regulate the life of all. The 
protest—the only great protest— 
comes everlastingly up from the first 
century: 

“A certain scribe came, and said unto 
Him, Master, I will follow Thee 
whithersoever Thou goest. And Je- 
sus saith unto him, The foxes have 
holes, and the birds of the air have 
nests; but the Son of man hath not 
where to lay his head.” 

[101] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


The Plight of Him Who Stays 


THE preacher that sticks by the 
farm community takes pot-luck with 
the farmer himself; and the socio- 
economic plight of the farmer has had 
front-page head-lines since the time of 
President Theodore Roosevelt. To- 
day, in the time of President Calvin 
Coolidge, those head-lines have become 
bigger and blacker. The farmer’s dol- 
lar, meanwhile, has become small and 
weak. His taxes have risen overnight 
like a spring freshet. His debts stare 
him in the face. His children are for- 
saking him for the high wages and high 
life of the city. He cannot pay the 
wages of labor in competition with 
automobile factories. 

The farmer’s social system in Amer- 
ica has broken down under the strain of 

[102] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


new forces. He needs the social help 
of men and women who will share his 
life, his privations, his hopes and fears. 
But they are to be men and women 
who see the farmer’s plight and, giving 
themselves to the task, struggle to or- 
ganize a modern rural social system. 
It is fruitless here to recite the tale 
of an underpaid country clergy, with 
its sequel of a socially visionless, un- 
trained set of honest parsons; fruit- 
less to point out how denominational 
strife has cut down the preacher’s sal- 
ary to less than a living wage. ‘True, 
the country parson has his poverty, 
and needs not to take any extra “‘vow of 
poverty.” This sort of thing will go 
on and on until there is a right-about 
on the part of those preachers who flee 
the country as if it were the plague. 


Strong men of social vision, men who 
[103] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


have come to understand the farmer’s 
social and economic plight, must turn 
their back on the city, and take up la- 
bors for the country flock. 


A New Type of Training School 


But will there ever be such a right- 
about-face of virile, holy men until we 
have in America a new type of theo- 
logical seminary for the training of 
country-bound ministers of Christ? 
I doubt it. The present schools of 
training are city-set, city-wise, city-sat- 
isfied; not but that a score or more of 
them give some “rural courses”; not but 
that a trickle of men has started already 
from them toward the country. You 
can better understand the case if I 
were to ask what hope there would 
have been for agricultural science, if 


total reliance had been placed upon the 
[104] 





EMPTY CHURCHES 


great city universities, Harvard, Yale, 
Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, to 
develop the practice of farming. Each 
of these universities has already made 
some notable contribution to agricul- 
ture in one form or another; but the 
great hope of agriculture lay in a farm- 
ing college, and fortunately, the com- 
mon sense of this country perceived 
this truth. 

In like manner, the hope of the rural 
ministry, in my estimation, lies in a 
rural theological seminary under the 
eaves of one of our great colleges of 
agriculture—preferably a college of 
agriculture in close proximity to a 
great state university. Here is the 
farmer’s intellectual center. Here are 
gathered men and women of hope for 
farm life. Here are the men and 
women who have social vision for rural 

[105] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





society. In touch with these men and 
women, under the spell of the intel- 
ligent hope for the American farm 
and farmer, a school of religion can 
grow up which will train men to go into 
the country and help redeem it from 
its present social chaos. They can 
carve out community churches of dis- 
tinction. They can create a line of 
such churches, wholly in rural territory, 
which will furnish steps of promotion 
for the most strenuous and ambitious 
pastors. Flight is not the cure of the 
plight of country parsons. The cure 
is rather intelligent consecration to the 
country flocks. 


[106] 


CHAPTER V 


“T) UT,” went on the author of 

Christian idealism,—mind you, in. 

the same breath in which He had paid to 

His followers the superb compliment, 

“Ye are the salt of the earth,’—“if the 
salt have lost its savor—” 

And the story of Protestant home 
missions in rural America during the 
last two or three decades has in it the 
taste of this “lost savor.” 

Let me lay bare before you,—with 
the shame of a churchman very much 
embarrassed, it must be confessed,— 
not so much the facts of this unsavory 
home-mission story, for the facts have 


been public property for some years, as 
[107] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


an interpretation of the facts and an 
appraisal of the damage done to 
American churchdom. 

For the benefit of him who does not 
understand the situation at all, a word 
is necessary. Here is the picture, and 
here are the essential features in the 
picture, whatever variations there may 
be in minor details. 


Turce Too Many Churches 


A community of rural folk of a defi- 
nite population is spread out before you. 
Christian churches, usually from two to 
ten in number, are alive, if not all going 
concerns in the community. What- 
ever differences there may be in the 
membership rolls—and of course we 
shall expect many points of difference 
here—or in the number of services per 


week or per month, or in the presence 
[108] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


or absence of resident pastors, or in 
the organization of the churches into 
Sunday-schools, mission societies, clubs, 
social committees and the like—what- 
ever the variations may be, I say, the 
number of persons in the community, 
counting every single soul, is far short — 
of enough to man all of the churches, 
use any reputable standard of church 
organization you please to measure by. 

Furthermore, in the type community 
In question, some or all of the churches 
are weak and ineffective, if not virtu- 
ally down and out. Moreover,—and 
this is the central feature of the picture, 
—one church is, or several or all of 
these churches are, receiving subsidies 
in the form of money from the home- 
mission funds of the respective denom- 
inational state body or national body 


or both, the sum of money being just 
[109] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


enough to keep the particular church 
competitively in the running in that 
community, 

The essential fact in this situation 
may be stated thus: In a community 
where there is known to be a mass 
of persons (in commercial parlance, 
“volume of business’’) sufficient to build 
and maintain only from one to five 
churches, there are actually found to 
be from two to ten; and the excess of 
churches over and above the number 
which the volume of business justifies 
is the direct result of the injection of 
home-mission moriey into the commu- 
nity. 


Veiled Hate 


Ir does not require a clever mind to 
know what will happen. When from 


two to ten kernels of corn are planted 
[110] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 





in a piece of soil which has nutritive 
elements sufficient to bring only from 
one to five stalks to maturity, we know 
that a struggle for life is on which may 
doom one stalk, several stalks, or even 
all stalks. It is so with the competi- 
tive churches; but the corn simile fails 
to illustrate the case at the really tragic 
point. The subsidized churches, which 
make up the redundance, create in the 
community what is known by every- 
_body there to be a case of veiled malig- 
nancy. Self-respecting persons either 
hold themselves aloof from formal re- 
ligion there, or, conscience-stricken, 
stand helplessly bewildered, or in plain 
disgust they pick up and leave. And 
the community turns sour. The salt 
has lost its savor. 

If you would sense the disaster of 


this competition, please read between 
[111] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the lines of the following resolution, 
passed within the last year, by a min- 
ister’s association in a small rural com- 
munity where six Protestant churches 
are breathing the air that is hardly 
enough for three! 


“Whereas we are joined together as 
Christain ministers in the association 
of brotherly fellowship and helpful co- 
working, we hereby agree that the 
following principles shall guide and 
control us individually, and, so far as 
our proper influence can go, our several 
congregations in our mutual relation- 
Ships icah ue | 


I. That we decline and discourage 
proselytizing in any form. 


II. While we recognize that every 
man is free to worship where and as he 
[112] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


wills, yet we realize that shifting from 
one denomination to another save from 
absolute religious conviction is not 
edifying, but harmful. Wherefore, 
we will not encourage those who from 
pique or temporary dissatisfaction with 
ministers or people of their own local | 
congregations wish to unite with ours. 


III. That we will not, save in excep- 
tional cases, receive into our Sunday- 
schools as regular members thereof, 
children of families who are affiliated 
with other congregations of the town. 


IV. That whenever we come across 

new-comers to the town who are 

affiliated with, or declare preference 

for, some Christian body other than our 

own we will not (if the church of their 

choice be represented by a congrega- 
[113] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


tion here) ask them to unite with our 
congregation or send their children to 
our Sunday-school until we have given 
to the minister or church officials of the 
church of their preference the name 
and address of such persons, and 
allowed reasonable opportunity for 
them to claim their own.” 

It is clear on the face of it that the 
recognized principles of Christianity 
have failed to keep these churches 
sweet to one another; and resort is, 
therefore, had to a contract—a perfectly 
human document of agreement, such as 
governs sinners in mundane business— 
in hope that an-out-and-out bargain 
may accomplish what Christian love 
can not. 

These ministers agree not to pros- 
elytize, not to encourage lifting mem- 
bers from another church, not to 

[114] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


receive children into the Sunday-school 
from families of another flock, not to 
pick up new-comers without advertis- 
ing them and waiting a reasonable 
length of time for a claimant. This 
document of “nots”—of things not to 
be done—naively uncovers the teasing 
things that were done behind curtains. 


Dispensing With Mission Aid 
BeErorE reading further, you will wish 
to know whether there is much of this 
sort of thing going on in rural Amer- 
ica; whether, in fact, it is not fussing 
over trifles to beckon anybody to look 
at this thing. 

The best authorities, after a long 
study on this subject, are quoted as 
estimating that the amount of Protest- 
ant home-mission money annually 
wasted in competitive religion in 

[115] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


rural communities is at present $3,000,- 
000; and if we may generalize from 
twenty-five thoroughly studied coun- 
ties, widely separated, where there are 
211 churches aided by home-mission 
money, of which 149 are disastrously 
competitive, “most of the home-mission 
aid which is now granted could be with- 
drawn without any danger whatsoever 
of leaving communities (rural) with in- 
adequate facilities.” 

The official report goes on to say, 
“Aside from any possible loss in de- 
nominational prestige, which a purely 
objective study such as this can not 
undertake to measure, on a careful ex- 
amination of all the data at hand, it 
seems that 149 of the 211 aided 
churches in these counties might be dis- 
pensed with, to the general advantage 


of the religious life in their communi- 
[116] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


ties and to the greater glory of the 
Kingdom of God.” 

This thing, look at it from any angle 
you please, is as rust on the wheat, a 
rot in the potato, a blight on the peach- 
tree, a boll-weevil in the cotton. God 
knows that the farmer already carries 
along enough of a handicap in com- 
munity matters without being afflicted 
with this canker on his religion, as a 
discipline. It certainly looks like 
jumping on the man that’s down. But 
this sin against the farmer is not the 
worst of the wicked business. 


Worse Than Wasted 


Waar hurts most in this paradoxical 
practice is the prostitution of the most 
beautiful gift in all religion. 
“Missions!” 
The very word conjures up angels 
[117] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


of mercy. It brings to mind the last 
words of Christ to his disciples and to 
his followers of all time. And this 
mission money (it is not so pathetic 
that it sometimes is the widow’s mite or 
that it is sometimes earned in feeble- 
ness with many a pain) is the purest 
money handled by men. It is the vis- 
ible sign of tears of longing for love to 
govern men. Missions are the church’s 
great romance. When out of the bar- 
renness and weakness of my little life, 
I put into the hands of the church a gift 
for the whomsoever, in faith, I do it 
with a prayer that it will help bring 
peace to some soul, harmony to some 
family, blessing to some community 
which is beyond my power otherwise 
to help. 

To think, then, that the tip of your 
prayer and mine, the sweetest thing we 

[118] | 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


can give, is poisoned, and shot into a 
rural community, there to hurt— 
Well the words, are not so much want- 
ing to express my indignation and 
yours, as the mind fails to comprehend 
how such tactless blunders can happen. 

“Why do these church bodies do this 
wicked thing?” you enquire. 

Let the words of a high church offi- 
cial I once knew convey to you not so 
much the real reason, as the state of 
mind out of which the thing grows! 

“So long as there is a fammly of our 
faith in that village, that family shall 
have the sacraments of our faith minis- 
tered to it.” 

He might just as well have added, 
“even though the heavens fall’; for 
what he did was to force a subsidy into 
a community to help a small faction 


of his particular church to survive when 
[119] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the majority of the people, even the 
majority of his own little church or- 
ganization, had voted voluntarily to cut 
down the number of churches and elim- 
inate the unnecessary one. ‘The high 
church official just ripped open a 
community sore, when it had begun to 
heal. He poured gall in again after 
somebody had sweetened community 
life for a moment. 


A New Religious Ethics Between 
Churches 


THE egotism of a particular church 
group; the flaunting individualism of 
a particular denominational combina- 
tion of persons, whose personal egos 
are, religiously, to be subjected, but 
whose combined ego is to be exalted! 
Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and 
religion between church groups. Shall 
| [120] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


it not be discussed? Especially when 
it grinds the rural community to pow- 
der? Shall it be good Christianity for 
one Christian sect to crowd and shove 
just like a bully in a mob? 

The day and generation is getting 
suspicious of pietists of all sorts who 
can tell sinners how to behave individu- 
ally to one another; yes, who can even 
tell the labor group how to behave to 
the employer group and the employer 
group to the labor group, but who have 
no conception of what Christian princi- 
ples apply as between one church 
group and another church group in the 
realm of religion, except to beat the 
other church group at all costs. If I 
were not heart and soul captured by the 
character, life, philosophy, and guid- 
ance of Jesus himself, if I were not 


thrilled by his words, and electrified by 
[121] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


his life and death, more and more the 
older I grow, I should be tempted to 
see in this cutthroat group egotism of 
competitive Christian church groups 
a decline of Christianity itself. 

“They all do it” is a lame excuse for 
sinners; but for a church body, it is 
tragic. Think of a million people, 
more or less, possessing one shibbol- 
eth, trying to embody earnestly the 
Christ, while deliberately hamstringing 
another Christian church body which is 
doing the same thing! 

But who is to blame? Whose sin is 
this prostitution of a holy thing? 

Did you ever happen to know the offi- 
clals at the head of a Protestant 
church body, either national or state? 
Did you ever know the persons who 
distribute home-mission money after 
it is once collected? Did you ever get 

[122] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


a glimpse of the inside? Well, if so, 
then you know how intensely human 
this situation is. You know how com- 
plex are the forces that operate, how 
like politics are the powers behind the 
locked doors. You know then that 
when you try to track this sinner, you 
can't find him. Nobody does the thing. 
Nobody does anything. Nobody is to | 
blame. The Christian leaders are not 
leading on such matters. They are 
fighting the individual sins of the 
people. 

What would America think of a 
great Christian leader who should come 
out and insist that Christian churches 
ought to love, respect, defer to other 
Christian churches? What a stir in 
Christendom it would make for a great 
man carrying his own church with him, 
let us say, to go up and down the land 

[123] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


preaching that membership in one 
Christian church should thereby make 
us members in all Christian churches; 
preaching that we should discount 


all the differences among Christian » 


churches and love all Christian churches 
for their likenesses? 

Look at this straw: 

In Canada an outstanding move- 
ment is nearing completion to unite 
organically three great Protestant 
bodies, affecting more than _ three 
quarters of a million of church mem- 
bers. The daily press recently in 
explanation of the union, carried this 
item: 

“The Union had its origin in the 
conviction that many _ separate 
churches of each denomination, espe- 
cially in the rural districts, were 


handicapped in limited membership and 
[124] 


SS a ee 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


were unable to maintain properly 
separate buildings and ministers. It is 
therefore a part of a tendency in many 
other countries to submerge religious 
‘differences in an effort at wider and 
more effective service.” 

This looks on the horizon like the 
peep of dawn of a new Christian day— 
and what a dawn for the rural com- 
munity that would be! 

But—lest we be too sanguine—that 
dawn has some climb to make yet. 
Has not the Home Mission Council of 
the Federal Council of Churches in 
America put into practice on the 
Western frontier for several years 
principles of denominational courtesy? 
Have not the phrases of their doc- 
uments on “Overchurching,” “Under- 
churching,” and “Wasteful Competi- 
tion” seeped very generally throughout 

[125] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the settled portions of the United 
States, as well as into the frontier? 
Have not the Foreign Mission Boards 
of the various denominations for years 
gained conspicuously the confidence of 
their laymen by the intelligent distribu- 
tion of territory among the missions of 
different church bodies abroad? The 
fact is and must be reckoned with that 
all the words and phrases and ideas and 
logic on this subject, pro and con, 
have been bandied about until they are 
almost threadbare. The will to do, 
however, is still very stubborn in old, 
established communities. 


[126] 


CHAPTER VI 


A HAT is the difference between 
a state university and an ordi- 
nary university?” 

A rather silly question, perhaps; but 
the answer that came back, lightning- 
like, gave me the jolt of my life, and in- 
cidentally pinked out in my mind the 
pattern for the community church. Here 
is the occasion and what took place: 

A reception for the distinguished 
regents of the University of Wisconsin 
at the home of the president. In due 
time I found myself approaching that 
awful reception line, terrifying, indeed, 
to me, a new-comer. Suddenly I be- 
came aware that I was shaking hands 
with the president, whose newness to the 
job of presiding over a university had 


not entirely worn off. 
[127] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


It was up to me to say something, 
and so, after the manner of a peda- 
gogue, I blurted out a question: 

“Mr. President, will you tell me the 
difference between a state univer- 
sity and an ordinary university ?” 

President Van Hise did n’t hesitate 
an instant with his answer. 

“T cannot speak for all state univer- 
sities,” said he, “‘but this university is 
run not for the students who happen to 
be here, but for the persons who may 
never see the university—even to the 
last man, woman, and child in the last 
community of the State.” 

I had become unconscious of the re- 
ception line, for I was startled with an 
idea foreign to my bringing up, and I 
must make sure that I perfectly under- 
stood. 

“Mr. President,” I interrupted, “do 

[128] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


you mean to say that the University 
of Wisconsin is not proud of turning 
out highly developed personalities?” 

“Only as carriers,” President Van 
Hise quickly replied, in his character- 
istic jerky manner; “carriers of ideas 
and attitudes even to the isolated com- 
munity and to the unpromising man. 
The students who are here are here, as it 
were, by accident. But the university 
is run for Wisconsin’s people at work.” 

I passed on down the line, and even- 
tually out into a world strange to me, 
where being a “carrier” of intellectual 
goods to the “isolated community” and 
to the “last man” was an academic 
commonplace. 

Fourteen years of that day-by-day 
commonplace, however, never rubbed 
off the beauty of its bloom for me; for 


here was a university running at least 
[129] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


neck and neck with church Christians 
in love for,—or duty to, if you prefer 
it so,—the Gospel’s whomsoever. 

Having seen with my own eyes 
these last communities of a State 
quickened into intellectual fervor 
through the devotion of university men 
and women, do you think I do not know 
what would happen to the spiritual life 
of these out-of-the-way communities if 
the supreme love of devoted church 
men and women were brought to bear 
upon them? 


A Forecast Founded on Fact 


I wi venture to forecast some of the 

things that would happen. Every 

rural community would have a com- 

munity church—a church for the whom- 

soever, even to the last man, woman, 

and child in that community. If 
[130] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


topographically possible, every such 
church community would stretch the 
bounds of its parish to include a 
thousand souls all told. In com- 
munities of two thousand souls, there 
would be two churches—two only, and 
both community churches. In com- 
munities of three thousand souls, there 
would be three community churches, 
and three churches only, every church, 
a community church; and no more 
churches than one to one thousand of 
the community population; for it takes 
one thousand of the population to main- 
tain an effectual modern church; and 
every church is to be a Christian com- 
munity church as a safeguard against 
paganism. But why am I so foolish 
as to foretell what would happen when 
I can tell what is happening? 


There are to-day, we are told by 
[131] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


those who keep informed on the mat- 
ter, a thousand community churches 
in the United States, of which the 
greater part are in rural territory. In 
fact, it is reported that new community 
churches are being organized at the rate, 
at present, of six a month. To say 
that there is a community church move- 
ment well-started is no exaggeration. 
Some States such as Massachusetts, 
Vermont, Connecticut, Ohio, Cali- 
fornia, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, are 
outstanding in the movement. 

Of course, the community church 1s 
not yet standardized, but it is shaping 
up. To affirm that there are three 
types, as some say, or five, a's others 
put it, is more or less arbitrary. Still, 
for the sake of the man who under- 
stands better by types, I may say that 


some community churches like to be 
[132] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


known as having arrived at the com- 
munity ideal by “federation” of two or 
more denominational churches, the new 
church preserving connection with a 
national church body. 

Other community churches pride 
themselves on being “union” churches, 
each having originated from the or- 
ganic union of two or more churches, 
or having been established as a “union” 
church in a community possessing no 
church, but containing families of var- 
ious denominational connections in the 
past. The union church once formed 
usually stands alone, without any de- 
nominational affiliation. 

Then there is the regular “denomina- 
tional” church, which either just hap- 
pens to be or has come purposely to be 
the only church in the community; and 
which makes the boast of existing for 

[133] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


the whole community rather than for 
its particular denominational group. 

And there are other varieties, which 
could indeed be dignified into types, if 
we were pushed to it. The important 
thing, however, is that out of a general 
unrest and dissatisfaction with churches 
that aim to keep breeding up within 
themselves a highly pedigreed group of 
personalities which possess decidedly 
exclusive, if not aristocratic, character- 
istics, have arisen overnight, as it were, 
churches which admit to the inner circle 
all the pedigrees and aim at the demo- 
cratic ideal of acting in the realm of 
religion for the last man, woman, and 
child in the community. 


Churches for the Whomsoever 


HERE we have before our very eyes, 
then, a kind of a church which is run, 
[134] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


as President Van Hise said his univer- 
sity was run, not for a select few 
within its walls, but for the whomsoever 
within its own territory; a church that 
views every single member as a “car- 
rier” of the goods of life to the last 
man, rather than as a precious mecha- 
nism in which should be lodged all the 
mysteries of a peculiar cult. 

Look over some of the stories of 
these churches which are confessedly 
trying to find their way to a new ex- 
pression of social religion designed to 
prevent the wastes of competitive 
Christianity. 

Here are the high points in an Idaho 
community church: Rural, in a town 
of 600 souls. Presbyterian by con- 
nection, but with members formerly 
of sixteen different denominations. 
Membership, 400. Plant worth $50,- 

[135] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


000, with eighteen separate class-rooms 
for Sunday-school use. A community 
house, with gymnasium. Rest room 
for women and girls. A week-day 
church school using one hour a week 
of school time. In summer, a daily va- 
cation Bible school. A Boy Scout 
troop. A Campfire Girls’ organiza- 
tion. Potato growers and fruit men 
freely using the community hall. 
High moral standards reflecting the 
unity of the people. 

Take another community church 
of farmers in Iowa, in the open coun- 
try: An architecturally commanding 
building, providing, like a well-organ- 
ized school-house, many separate rooms 
for religious instruction. The church 
has deliberately packed into its concep- 
tion of “community church” the idea 
that, assuming Christianity to have con- 

[136] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


tact with every phase of living, the 
church has responsibility for providing 
the auspices under which all social ac- 
tivities of the community take place. 
What more natural, then, than that the 
Fourth of July celebration should be 
around the most beautiful spot in the 
community, the church? Farmers’ 
Institute in the church? Young people 
having a place for good times at the 
church? A church committee looking 
after the matter of bringing good fam- 
ilies on to farms that are for sale or 
rent in the community? 

Take a certain community church in 
Indiana. Here is the story of an hon- 
est struggle on the part of four church 
pedigrees to burn their bridges behind 
them, and, pooling their resources, to 
start in anew. The peculiar traditions 
of each cult, however, cling desperately 

[137] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


to each group, until, after trying in vain 
to carry these psychological contradic- 
tions along in an artificial unity, in a 
moment of supreme devotion to the 
good of their community, they strip off 
their trade-marks, forget their shib- 
boleths, and step forward into religious 
freedom. 

The community-church movement is 
not going to create, I surmise, new 
sects, leaving a residuum of several 
more denominations. Rather it is a 
real step towards the organic union of 
kindred church bodies on the one hand, 
and so a reduction of sects; and on the 
other hand, a step towards democratiz- 
ing every church and making it a real 
community church. 


The Rural Dilemma and the Way Out 


Ir WILL require only another thousand 
[138] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


of these brave, venturesome community 
churches to turn every select-bodied 
denomination to looking itself over. 
This self-criticism will lead the great 
Protestant church bodies, let us hope, 
to a church conscience in regard to 
destructive church competition. Then 
it will be an easy step to coming to 
terms with one another in any locality, 
so as to give the community a chance to 
have a community church. 

The community church, if we can 
have any faith in mankind, is sure to 
come along strong. If high officials 
become obstructionists, they will be 
swept away; for the people, when they 
once clearly see, will have their way in 
churches and religion as in the long run 
they do in government and politics. 

The sooner the great Protestant 
bodies confess their sins of competition 

[139] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


and put their houses in order, the 
sooner the new day will come for the 
remote community and the last man. 

Some of us know what it is to be 
a devotee of a great church sect. The 
absolute rightness of our cult has been 
no more questionable than our own ex- 
istence. When our sect was in paral- 
lel columns with any other religious 
sect, we did not, could not yield right 
of way. 

But when we are all consciously con- 
fronted with the problem of working 
out the religious life of 30,000,000 of 
isolated farm people, we wake up to 
the fact that we occupy a position 
where cult pride, cult individualism, 
and cult exclusiveness break down. 
Then we find ourselves in a dilemma; 
we must leave the farmers to rot, a 
thing which is unquestionably abhor- 

[140] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


rent to our cult; or we must modify 
our cult, a thing which on the surface 
seems a sacrilege to do. 

But there is a way out of every 
dilemma; generally, however at the 
cost of a bit of human pride. The com- 
munity church shows the various noble 
church cults one way out of the rural 
church dilemma. 

Read these bold words from a group 
of fifty young Methodist rural workers 
penned to bishops: 

“To the Bishops of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church: We the under- 
signed members of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church appeal to you to 
give prayerful consideration to the 
following suggestions: 


1. That the bishops, district super- 
intendents, and other administrative 
officers of our denomination cordially 

[141] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


cooperate with the leaders of other de- 
nominations in an effort to so organize 
rural church geographical units that 
not more than one Protestant church 
to every one thousand population shall 
prevail as a standard. 


2. That service to the community 
rather than to the denomination be the 
basis on which ministers shall be 
trained, appointed, and promoted. 


3. That the Methodist Episcopal 
Church take the lead in the give- 
and-take method with other denomi- 
nations, even to the extent of 
encouraging the discontinuance of 
small, struggling, competing Method- 
ist churches in the interest of rural 
Christian service to the communities 
involved. 


4, That zeal for service to the entire 
[142] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


community and a sympathetic con- 
sideration for those whose background 
and training are non-Methodist shall 
characterize the efforts of the Method- 
ist Episcopal Church wherever it alone 
occupies a rural field. 


5. That the conference membership — 
of a Methodist Episcopal minister 
shall not be jeopardized by appoint-— 
ment as pastor of a federated or un- 
denominational church where such a 
_ church is required for the largest ser- 
vice to the community.” 


Theological students and _ college 
students are not to be outdone by their 
elders in bravery. Read the following 
document for circulation among the 
officials of the various church bodies— 
a document which sounds like the “first 


call” for the rural community church: 
[143] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


“We the rural college student dele- 
gates at the American Country Life 
Association Student Conference believe 
that the minister who serves in a church 
which has no right to exist loses respect 
for his profession and can not do out- 
standing work; we believe that our 
denominational boards which appopri- 
ate money we give to keep churches 
going in overchurched communities and 
which send leadership into such com- 
munities are only making people feel 
that the ideals of Christianity are no 
higher than those of pagan religions. 
We would apply the principles and 
teachings of Jesus Christ. Therefore 
we recommend: 


1. That students preparing to enter 
the rural ministry refuse to serve 
charges in overchurched communi- 
ties. 

[144] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


2. That we, as rural students, do all 
in our power in our communities and in 
places of leadership that we may attain 
to prevent denominational church 
boards from pouring money and leader- 
ship into communities, which is to be 
used to perpetuate denominational 
strife that is destroying the religious 
life of our communities. 


3. That we pledge ourselves to en- 
deavor to substitute the principles and 
teachings of Jesus Christ for narrow 
denominational creeds and doctrines. 
In view of this, we shall try to obtain 
an atmosphere and physical equipment 
of rural churches, as well as church 
services themselves, that shall be de- 
signed to meet the physical, social, men- 
tal, and spiritual needs of the people 
who worship there, regardless of their 
denominations.” 

[145] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


The press carries the story that 
down in Georgia five hundred farmers 
Jast season dedicated an acre of land 
apiece, with all it grew, to the Lord. 
These pieces of land are spoken of 
generally in Georgia as the “Lord’s 
Acres,” and the “Lord’s Acre Plan” 
is hailed as a hundred per cent. way to 
finance the country church. 

The story goes on to say: 

“Farmers in the South are firmly 
convinced that the Lord’s Acre yields 
better crops than surrounding land, 
and that the entire farm of the one 
giving the acre is more productive than 
those of his neighbors.” 


The Community Church as a Democ- 
racy 


THE community church strikes me as 
a Lord’s Acre in rural Christendom 
[146] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


bearing a crop dedicated to God. 
And, if I read the returns aright, the 
comparative yield justifies the belief. 
It is a church of the people—a democ- 
racy in very truth. Any subtle in- 
fluence that would tend to wash in upon 
this democracy and wear it down to a 
dominating set of people or to a group 
of negligible folk or to a loose aggre- 
gation of nondescripts must be walled 
off with reinforced concrete. 

A single type of religious tempera- 
ment will not govern the range and 
character of the community church. 
A constant sort of ideals that appeals 
only to the seraphic souls or to other 
minds only in moments of exalted pitch 
will, by a natural process of elimination, 
soon reduce the church to a tempera- 
mental sect. No, the church is made 
up of all temperaments the matter-of- 

[147] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


fact, active, and practical; the poetic, 
sentimental, imaginative; the stren- 
uous; the easy-going; the enthusias- 
tic; the petty; the anxious; the 
generous, self-denying; the jolly, 
optimistic; the gloomy, conservative; 
the militant, crusading; the important; 
the retiring. Their interests, too— 
the interests of the whole church are 
as broad and various as human nature. 

A cross-section of Christianity will 
reveal a ten-thousand fold variegation 
of human streak and human color 
wherever religion has filtered into 
actual life. This meeting-ground of 
all the higher interests of the community 
will, therefore, be home for each inter- 
est. Asno single type of temperament 
should repulse the others and shrink the 
church, so no single activity of the 
church should monopolize the focus of 

[148] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


attention. [The mission interest, the 
Bible interest, the educational interest, 
the interests social, musical, ceremon- 
ial, disciplinary, the evangelistic inter- 
est, the civic and industrial interest, the 
financial interest, the idealistic inter- 
est, both personal and social—all these 
and the rest will have good footing in 
the community church. 

A church which should undertake to 
be a democracy in fact would find that 
there is only one way of “maintaining 
interest”’ enough actually to keep bring- 
ing the people together. This way is 
sounding God’s summons to keep going 
the redemption of its community at 
every point. ‘The summons to definite 
undertakings to improve community 
life is like the summons to a pioneer 
homesteader to make a home fit for his 
family. He gears his hands to ax and 

[149] 


EMPTY CHURCHES 


saw, to plow and hammer, and he knows 
that he can change the wilderness. 
Besides stereotyped church pro- 
cedure, a steady look at living condi- 
tions in the community, with the deter- 
mined expectation of changing these 
conditions for the better; a look for the 
moral clues to whole wretched situa- 
tions; a look to disentangle from the 
chaotic mass single, great, unmistake- 
able moral issues—these steady looks, 
under God’s summons, must be given 
anew in every generation to the 
kaleidoscopic facts of human life. 
The church that shall go into the bus- 
iness of becoming self-conscious and of 
realizing its democracy will hear God’s 
summons to community redemption 
and begin to re-scale the map of church 
importance and usefulness in the com- 


munity on heroic lines. 
[150] 


i 
6 RM Or ta Ste 
Pe ay real Aw ‘ 


Pir an) 


ag y) 
Me 
\ 


7, 
a ¢ 
i 
fi 

FY 


at 


e.3) 





i 


3397 











